Beautiful graphics, and interesting premise but the game itself is extremely frustrating. The puzzles themselves are pretty simple, but in addition to the old pixel hunt style, the game doesn't enable the hotspots for items or usable scenery until specific times. Then, just to ramp up the frustration, there are timed puzzles, with the same constraints. Suddenly scenery and items become arbitrarily active or inactive, with little time to experiment and search. Feels like a serving of frustration with a side of screw you from the author. Having a walkthrough helps, but it'll just piss you off when you see that your solution was correct -- you just weren't doing it the way the designer wanted you to, and at the right time that the designer wanted you to.

Well, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is a short adventure game based on The Carnival of Immortals - or La Foire aux immortels, the first book of Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy, a series of graphics novels that illustrates 2023 Paris as an incredibly dark political dystopia with science fiction elements. Aside Enki Bilal's genius in depicting the surreal and the grotesque in Nikopol series, this game is a heavily watered down version of the first book, from Nikopol Jr.'s perspective.

It's year 2023. After two nuclear wars, countless political confrontations and casual genetic mutations, the world has become disease-ridden and post-apocalyptic. We take the silent, oblivious artist Nikopol Jr.'s perspective as puppeteered elections for the nation of Paris approaches. He is a silent romantic in a degenerate era. With the appearance of an odd spaceship in the form of an Egyptian pyramid on Paris astroport, Alcide Nikopol's life is about to change drastically.

Before continuing with my review, I have to warn you: if you are to only play this game, without reading comics first, I suspect that you would be capable of understanding anything. As a stand-alone game, story presentation is mismatched and rushed. It is more than likely to complete the whole game without understanding anything about the affairs going around. The setting is not well-presented enough to capture the grotesque genius of the series and a great amount of characters, events, explanations are completely skipped in this bland interpretation. So if you've found the concept to your liking and got curious, drop the game and get yourself Nikopol Trilogy to enjoy an A+ quality creepy dystopia.

Okay, now we've established the quality difference between graphic novels and the game, I'll focus on the game. Graphics might be considered beautiful in their own displays, and character animations are quite elegant. I especially liked the character designs for Egyptian characters - Horus and Anubis. Voice acting isn't marvelous, and the subtitles being nonexistent doesn't stand in the favor of the game either though.

Well, when we talk about the gameplay, Nikopol has its list of downsides. Without the usage of a walkthrough, it is possible to miss an item and keep playing only to find that you cannot progress anymore due to the item not being available for you to grab anymore. On that department, I suggest saving a lot - which is another issue, with only 10 save slots given. Also, you are capable of dying in a handful of imaginative ways, considering that you are treated as a terrorist by the government from the start of your game. In that sense, no, this is not your casual point and click adventure. Puzzles are usually interesting and imaginative, and they demand prior attention to the storyline, so you have to keep certain facts at mind before trying to handle a puzzle. With the slightest mistake, you are prone to alarming security and getting shot down. Luckily, game restores your position before being shut down every time.

As an adventure game, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals isn't anything unique or even interesting, with its grander equivalents around. As an Enki Bilal interpretation, it could present you a brief smile if you are already familiar with his work. If not, go fetch the comic book. Only after reading the original work, if you could say that you are still curious, yeah, go ahead. Otherwise, the game won't mean anything to you.

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Nikopol has never had a very good reputation on Steam, stretching all the way back to its launch. I've always been curious about it, what with its futuristic stylings and rad floating pyramid. Honestly, starting it up it felt no worse than a lot of indie adventures, and the sharp pre-rendered backgrounds and interesting setting did a lot to get me in the mood for some weirdness. But the weirdness was quickly drowned out by some unexpected pixel hunts, some aggravatingly complex puzzles, and a general lack of polish and important details.

Based on the works of a French graphic novelist (whom I am definitely going to check out now), Nikopol is the story of a guy named Nikopol, strangely enough. He lives in a dystopian Paris ruled by a theological dictatorship in the year 2023, which I just realized is a scant six years from now. Le Pen's Paris is a gray and decaying place, full of armored soldiers and what I can only assume are genetically-engineered creatures dedicated to enforcing their laws. Nikopol, an artist and member of the resistance, gets chased out of his apartment by one of these beasts and into the jaws of a conspiracy involving the church, his father, Egyptian gods, and... wait, what?

The moment Anubis himself meets you in a slummy urban graveyard is probably the moment that what weak grasp you have on the plot is lost. There's clearly a LOT going on here with the different shades of religion and many factions vying for power in the shadow of the enigmatic floating pyramid, and you're going to get approximately none of it here. Monsters and cyborgs and spirits will appear to give their little spiels and then vanish back to wherever the hell they came from, leaving you to toil through the puzzles and reach your goal with little rhyme or reason to guide you.

And those puzzles, Jesus Cyberchrist those puzzles. So in one scene, there's a vending machine holding funerary urns full of ashes and you need the one your mom is in. You need coins from an offering box next to you but the cyborg priest is using a wall-mounted mirror to make sure you don't dip into his tithes. The solution is to pick up a nearly-invisible rock from the ground, chuck it at the mirror to break it, and then use the coins to sort through the machine one urn at a time in search of your mom. This, of course, is used to set up a ritual room of stone plates and chalk drawings using "A is next to B, B can't be across from C" puzzle clues, and then later using that room to solve a secret message substitution code.

That's Nikopol in a nutshell, a mess of confusing and frustrating puzzles carrying along a hopelessly incomprehensible plot. So many of the items you need are nearly invisible both because they blend perfectly into the detailed scenes and because you won't even realize you need them in the first place. To clear the debris from one doorway you have to (a) pick up a brick from the debris, (b) clear a specific spot on the floor, (c) place the brick, (d) pick up and place a tall board to prop the ceiling, and then (e) use a hammer to knock away the rest of the debris. The only clue you're going to get to ANY of this is a line about the ceiling being unstable. And this is going to be every chapter, with the puzzles getting worse and worse.

It's a real shame too, because with a little more focus and polish and, um, story this could have been quite good. The static scenes you explore are well-detailed, a few of the puzzles early on aren't too terrible, the voice acting is... passable... Okay, maybe this one was doomed regardless but it still could have been better than this. At the very least they could have hired a real translator instead of transcribing dialogue with hilariously obvious misspellings. Really though that's just one more annoyance to add to a veritable mountain of troubles. Nikopol's reputation for being frustrating and incomprehensible precedes it for good reason, and it's bad enough that there's no chance I'll ever see its end.



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The secret is you need to read the comic or see the movie to have a clue what is going on. The story in the game is not well told on its own, leaving a lot of questions and confusion by the end with half-told tales and rushed through reveals. This isn't helped by the brevity of the game, which is going to be 4-5 hours for the average gamer. For the gameplay itself, the core is made up around point-and-click puzzles to solve. Some of these puzzles are frustrating pixel hunts that may depend on mousing over something near a corner of the floor rather than on being cleverly designed.

However, it isn't all bad. Some of the puzzles do work well and make sense, even if they are overshadowed by the more frustrating experiences. Also, the game looks great (for its time) and I especially appreciated the style of the cinematics which emulated the graphic novel (comic book) origins of the story / game. On that note, while the game almost requires you to have read the comic or seen the movie to really understand everything going on, it does work well if you do have that knowledge and, especially, if you were a fan of that source material.

Overall, I would say that this game should be skipped by most, but if you are a diehard fan of point-and-clicks...especially futuristic, dystopian ones...or if you really enjoyed the source material (The Carnival of Immortals comic, or Immortal the movie) and wanted to play a sort of video game companion, then this actually may do just fine for you.

It's unclear whether something important is either lost in translation, or just expected to be found in sources outside of the content of the game, but either way, the events in Nikopol feel like a drug trip; nothing that happens ever seems to make much sense, and everybody who inhabits its world operates on some inscrutible, Lynchian-esque, fever-dream logic that never reveals itself to the player over the course of the game.

To further complicate things, the game's frequently frustrating and obtuse puzzles are presented—visually and mechanically—in a manner that would have seemed quaint in a game 10 years its senior; as difficult as it may be to tell at face value, Nikopol was released contemporaneously with titles like Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Mirror's Edge, just to name a few.

While it manages to use what modest technical grunt it has to establish the look and mood of the world fairly well, it's by-and-large a clunky and awkward experience that runs the gamut of insulting your intelligence, completely ignoring logic and physics, assuming you're a member of Mensa, and occasionally giving you clues to puzzles that almost seem designed to mislead you.

I admit that, as someone who isn't French and hadn't read Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy (upon which this game is based), perhaps I'm simply not the target audience of this game. That said, as someone who had watched the movie adaptation (Immortel Ad Vitam), and bought this game shortly after only to finally finish it like a long list of Sunday chores with the help of walkthroughs some seven years later, I still don't feel any closer to understanding what, exactly, the Secrets of the Immortals were, or why anyone should care to find out.

This adventure game was just too boring to enjoy. The puzzles pretty much ruin any chance this story has at being decent. The art style was nice though.

Looks pretty, but endless pixel-hunting problems (find the thin black rod on the dark grey background), random timed problems (find the invisible pixel while being shot at), and nonsensical immersion-breaking mini-games (unblock a bricked up door in a set number of hammer blows - miss one? sorry, start over), combined with with a very short, not particularly engaging story, make this a ho-hum experience, The original comic comes out of the French tradition of beautiful art combined with stories that could be generously described as cryptic, or ungenerously described as unintelligible props for pretty pictures. Instead of adding detail to the world, this game makes you wonder how anyone in the comics got anything done if they had to spend this much effort to open a door. Certainly not the worst point-and-click game ever, but only worth looking at if highly discounted.

I played it through the end, but I can't recommend it for everyone. Nikopol is an point and click adventure with prerendered backgrounds based on the Nikopol story by Enki Bilal. And to be honest that is it greatest plus, so if you've never heard of any of those two then you probably want to skip this game.

<tl;dr>
Pro:
+ Nice Artwork, inspired by Enki Bilal
+ References to his works
+ Can be beaten in one evening (might want to consult a guide)

Con:
- Some very difficult puzzles
- Timed events that result in your death if you're not quick enough
- Generally not much instructions, more of a trial and error approach
- Though this has not happend to me, players in the forum complained about situations where you run into a dead end, without the game telling you that.
- No movement. You're in a fixed position, where you can rotate 360° and can interact with things and/or travel to the next screen.
- No hotspots, making some things difficult to find (e.g. projector start button)

Two final statements: Go read the comics/graphic novels and consider using a guide to play this game.

The first puzzle scene is fun, but it's all downhill from there. Plus, you can finish the game in a couple of hours. Don't know how much it sells for, but worth about 2 bucks, to stave off boredom for an afternoon. Played once, finished, and never opened it again.

A point and click game with a really weird story and weird movement. You get used to the movement quite easily but there is other issues with the game like: multiple timed sequences that get you killed if you don't figure out what to do fast enough and bad puzzles to solve. Needless to say I am not a fan of the game.

Works more of less fine (freezes for a second from time to time) on Linux with Proton (7.0-4).